Effect of hard limiting on the probabilities of incorrect dismissal and false alarm at the output of an envelope detector

This paper is concerned with the effect of hard limiting on the signal detectability of a system consisting of a limiter, narrow-band filter, and envelope detector in cascade. The input to the system is a pulsed IF signal immersed in noise whose power spectrum is uniform over a band of width cycles. Assuming that the noise bandwidth is much larger than the bandwidth of the narrow-band filter, the probability distribution of the output of the filter will approach Gaussian. A bivariate Edgeworth series approximation is necessary to handle the narrow-band-filter output since the "in-phase" and "quadrature" components of the narrow-band-filter output are statistically dependent random variables. An expression is derived for the probability of incorrect dismissal that requires the numerical evaluation of single integrals only. From the same bivariate Edgeworth series, an expression is derived for the probability-density function of the output of the envelope detector for the zero-input-signal case. Subsequent integration leads to the probability of false alarm.